Wednesday, March 30, 2016

When I recently visited Duke Law School I had the pleasure of talking with Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati about their very innovative thoughts on resettling refugees, by giving them legally recognized financial claims against the countries that made them refugees, that could be pursued by their host countries. Here's a link to their paper:

The unprecedented scale of the modern refugee crisis demands novel legal solutions. As a matter of national incentives, the goal must be to design mechanisms that discourage countries from creating refugees, and encourages other countries to welcome them. One way to achieve this would be to recognize that persecuted refugee groups have a financial claim against their countries of origin, and that this claim can be traded to host nations in exchange for acceptance. Modifications to the international apparatus would be necessary, but the basic legal elements of this proposal already exist. In short, international law can and should give refugees a legal asset, give host nations incentives to accept them, and give oppressive countries of origin the bill.